Max Mosley's victory in the High Court should be celebrated because it exposed the hypocrisy of the News of the World: its mean and suicidal decision to reduce payment to the call girl and main witness, Woman E, by more than half; the pomposity of editor Colin Myler, who insisted that he was motivated by public interest; and the blackmail, unreliability and inconsistencies of its reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

Since the judgment, there has been much hand-wringing about the freedom of the press. Most of it is self-serving. The damage to the press has not been done by Mosley, or the law, but by the practices of the News of the World. The public-interest defence still remains, but because of the Mosley case, newspapers are now going to have to justify such exposés under the chilly gaze of Mr Justice Eady and the accumulation of privacy law.

That's no bad thing, but my joy at the vanquishing of the News of the World is tempered by the knowledge that while our society haphazardly builds the law to protect privacy in this one limited sphere, we are busily destroying it in almost every other area.

In the last few weeks, we have learnt that government plans legislation to give the state access to every email, phone call, text message and internet connection made in this country. The latest figures available show that under current laws, 500,000 requests were made during one year for private communications data. That figure is up on the previous two years by almost 30 per cent.

We also learnt that in the last year local councils have launched 10,000 operations to spy on members of the public who are thought to be guilty of minor misdemeanours such as fly-tipping, avoiding council tax or applying to a school out of their area. So, if I have got this right, a person who spends the afternoon with five call girls is now guaranteed privacy, but heaven protect him if he lets his dog foul the pavement. In the future, while Mr Mosley may visit Ms Whiplash in private, calls to his family could be monitored.

Sir Christopher Rose, the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, has attacked the growth in surveillance by saying that councils have 'a serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality'. I would extend that to the entire government, which is suffering several defensive illusions that suggest we are under attack from ever more violent crime and antisocial behaviour.

The figures tell the opposite. Nationally, violent crime has almost halved since the mid-Nineties. Crime figures for the Metropolitan area show a fall of 14 per cent in knife crime and a similar amount in gun crime. There were 21 fewer murders (down from 175 to 154) and youth crime is down by 7 per cent.

The government - and to a lesser extent the public - is heedless of this steady downward trend and continues to argue for greater security and more intrusive measures. Few questioned the use by Staffordshire police of a remote-controlled spy drone to monitor crowds at the V Festival or bother to think of its potential use in spying on legitimate political demonstrations. 'How long will it be before someone gets Tasered from the air for dropping litter?' asked Noel Sharkey of Sheffield University. Just because the technology is available, we don't have to buy into it as a society.

The same is true of fingerprinting at schools. Chipping Campden School in Gloucestershire - you cannot think of a more idyllic, less threatening environment - has introduced biometric fingerprinting to stop bullying and truancy. A forensic attack on the policy by actor and director Chris Jury, whose son attends the school, shows that the system cannot stop bullying and will not stop truancy, because it logs pupils going into school but not leaving. One wonders what the point is of the £27,000 system, other than preparing a generation for life in the database state and giving the school authorities the warm glow of control.

As I have said a few times before, once our privacy goes, we will lose it forever. But try telling that to a popular press obsessed with crime, as well as scandal and celebrity, or the government. Both have an interest in stoking up fear, because fear sells newspapers, as well as repressive measures.

Think back 20 years and ask yourself if we would have accepted the almost casual announcement by the government that it planned to spy on all our private communications. It would have been out of the question because 20 years ago everyone knew what lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The same is true of the Transformational Government programme which will allow sharing of all our data horizontally as well vertically, without our consent. The government will soon have what the Americans called 'total information awareness'. Nothing represents a greater threat to privacy.

A kind of panic exists in Britain which you do not find in other European countries. But ideology of sort is also at work. A paper by Perri 6, Charles Raab and Christine Bellamy, published in 2005, admitted a severe tension between data sharing and the right to privacy, which the government could not resolve. The Blair administration first tried 'to find a way round data protection barriers', then resorted to the argument that guidelines and safeguards would protect the public from abuse and incompetence.

'It is a reflection of Labour's emphasis on rights and duties [my italics] as reciprocal elements in citizens' relations with the state,' say the authors, 'that subjecting individuals' data to tests for risk is now regarded as the quid pro quo for their receiving help from public funds.'

Put in simple terms, the citizen is deemed to owe more to the state than ever before and in an era of anticipation - intelligence-led policing, early intervention in problem families and so forth - data sharing is essential for the authorities. What we should understand is that in this vast, bossy, communitarian project, a theft is taking place of a prized possession - privacy, the thing that once defined us.

When Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: 'The individual has no right to anonymity; the state has a right to know who you are', he unwittingly expressed the essence of Labour's programme.

The state has the right to know only a few details about us, but not who we are, just as it has no business monitoring our movements, communications and sharing our personal information with foreign powers. Or, for that matter, giving private companies access to 4.2 million profiles on the national DNA database, one million of which belong to innocent people.

Privacy law is being made in the courts piecemeal by judges responding to the supposed guarantees of the Human Rights Act. This is unsatisfactory. What we need is a new privacy law that takes in all these developments - not just the ones that appear before Justice Eady - and resolves the problems identified by Labour in its murmured deliberations about privacy and the database state. There are few more important issues that face this government or the next.